Editor's Corner

Dear Editrix:

We put things in alphabetical order all the time, but who decided what order that should be? We can all recite the alphabet, but we all recite it in exactly the same order. Why isn’t it “I before E”? Who determined that we should start with A and end with Z? I smell a conspiracy somewhere.

Sincerely,

R Before F

Dear Mr. F.,

I found a great article about this, including information on the alphabet song. It is four or five times longer than the Editor’s Corner usually is, so I will include part of it here, along with a link to the original Mental Floss article, by Matt Soniak. If you skip through most of it, at least have a look at the link towards the end, with the University of Maryland’s animation. It’s super cool!

Warm regards,

Editrix

The alphabet, as best as historians can tell, got its start in ancient Egypt sometime in the Middle Bronze Age, but not with the Egyptians. They were, at the time, writing with a set of hieroglyphs that were used both as representations of the consonants of their language and as logographs (a logograph or logogram is a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word). While the glyphs were sort of alphabetic in nature, they were used more for their logographic component than as “letters.”

It was either Canaanite workers living on the Sinai Peninsula in the 19th century BC or Semitic workers living in Central Egypt in the 15th century BC who created the first purely alphabetic script. Over the next few centuries, this alphabet spread through the rest of the Middle East and into Europe. Almost all subsequent alphabets in the Western world have either descended from it, or been inspired by or adapted from one of its descendants.

The first people to extensively use the alphabet as it emerged from Egypt were the Phoenicians, who ruled a small empire of maritime city-states and colonies around the Mediterranean. Their extensive use of the alphabet in business dealings throughout their vast trade network led to its quick spread throughout the Mediterranean region — later versions were called the Phoenician alphabet.

The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet sometime in the 8th century BC or earlier, keeping the order and adapting it for use with their own language. (For example, the Phoenician alphabet did not have letters representing vowel sounds, which were important in the Greek language and had to be added). After they had worked out the finer points of their new alphabet, Greeks living on the Italian peninsula came in contact with a tribe known as the Latins. Sometime in the 5th century BC, the tribe adopted writing from the Greeks and another tribe called the Etruscans, choosing and mixing letters from the two alphabets as they needed.

The Latins would expand in population, geographic size, and cultural influence over the centuries, creating a little empire called Rome. As they conquered most of Europe, the Romans took their alphabet with them and spread it to new lands. Even when the empire contracted and fell, the Latin alphabet survived with the people of former Roman lands. The alphabet was adapted to some native languages and exerted influence on others — most notably for us, Old English, which gave rise to Middle English and the Modern English we use today.

Simple as ABC

For all the adaptations and mutations, the alphabet’s order of letters has been relatively stable. In the 1920s, archaeologists found a dozen stone tablets used in a school in Ugarit, a city in what is now Syria, that are from the fourteenth century BC and preserve two orders of the Ugaritic alphabet. One, the "Northern Semitic order" is related to the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets and features bits and pieces of an order familiar to Modern English speakers: a, b…g, h…l, m…q,r.

As the alphabet traveled around the world, those who adopted it did very little to change the basic order. Looking at this animation from the University of Maryland, you can see how things have remained largely the same between the Phoenicians and Latin. Long strings of letters, like abcdef, remain untouched for thousands of years.

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

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